After The Pogrom: Is Evil Real?
'The prettiest trick of the devil is to make us believe he doesn't exist.' - Baudelaire
The terrible events in Israel and Gaza this week bring to mind a conversation I’ve been having with a friend of mine, Dave Smith, since we were 17 years old.
Dave is also a writer, who has concentrated his great creative energies on writing books about the dark side of life - the Jamie Bulger case, the murderer Crippen and the killing of Jill Dando being just three of his very impressive true crime chronicles.
The conversation - often shading into argument, sometimes passionate - is whether evil is real.
Dave, despite his in-depth and comprehensive experience of human darkness has always believed that the terrible acts that people commit can always be explained away by historical circumstance of one kind or another. People who do bad things, he argues, are damaged themselves, often very seriously, and are merely acting out the historical sins perpetrated on them by others. Most child abusers have been themselves abused, he points out. WH Auden sums up his position in his poem ‘1939’ - 'Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return'
It is impossible to discount Dave’s argument. Many people who do awful things have had awful things done to them. The sins of Ghislaine Maxwell, in this analysis, can be explained by having a bullying and even abusive father. The Bulger killers, each children themselves when they committed their crime, had dysfunctional childhoods.
There are also the Lucy Letby’s of the world ( the nurse recently convicted of murdering babies under her care), evildoers here no such childhood scars are apparent. But Dave would say that the damage has simply not yet been revealed to a wider public yet.
To extrapolate such acts of darkness to a global perspective, can the actions of Hamas last week - beheading babies and other such horrors - be seen as the result of Palestine being an ‘abused child’, acting out its damage on the wider world? And are the actions of Israel also the actions of an ‘abused child’ , conditioned by the Holocaust and centuries of pogroms to commit brutality itself?
Many see it that way, rationalising the murderous actions of Hamas as being in some sense equivalent to the colonisation of Palestine by Israel and the subsequent oppression of the Palestinian people.
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